The Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead is a great collection of concert tapes. There are over 2,000 unique concerts. There are multiple recordings of most concerts. This series attempts to provide a simple interface to this collection by selecting one recording for each concert on a given date. Preference is given to tapes processed by the great Charlie Miller and sound board tapes. Not all shows are well recorded but the there are great moments here. Dig in and enjoy! You didn’t have to be there. Good Luck.

The Grateful Dead: Dark Star Rising (1966 – 1969)

After leaving the Army in 1960 (the story goes that he lost a tank) Jerry Garcia gravitated towards bluegrass (playing banjo in his band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and LSD (1964). Jerry, Pigpen, Phil, Bill and (the under aged) Bob formed the Warlocks in 1965 playing as the ‘house band’ with Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in San Francisco. Tom joined in 1968 and was very important to the massive Dark Stars of yore. Owsley Stanley (The Bear) was both chemist and sound man for the Grateful Dead. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced and help distribute more than 1.25 million doses of LSD. Owsley helped develp the distinctive ‘Steal You Face’ Skull logo for the Dead. Many of the early live recordings of the Grateful Dead where due to Owsley’s efforts and his unique approach to clairity and simplicity in miking allows us to experence much of the early shows ‘as they were.’

A list of all soundboard tapes of Dark Star performances on the Internet Archive can be found here.

A list of all soundboard tapes of Scarlet Begonia -> Fire On The Mountain performances on the Internet Archive can be found here.

The amazing Internet Archive in a global treasure of archived public domain Moving Images, Live Music, Audio recording and Text. For Dead head the Internet Archives Grateful Dead collection is priceless. Here is the basic statement of purpose from the Internet Archive on the Grateful Dead collection:

The Grateful Dead is being separated from the Live Music Archive into its own collection (with its own forum) to avoid confusion about lossless availability. The metadata and reviews for shows and recordings, even those not available for regular download, will remain available for those who maintain direct links. No filesets have been deleted from the Archive; certain items are simply not public now. Prior to our completing the changes, text files are easily referenced at a separate database.

At this time, the Grateful Dead collection is not open to public uploads. The Grateful Dead Internet Archive Project (GDIAP) will continue its direct management of this collection for the time being.

As far as we know, there has been no change to standard GD fan trading. It is common for bands to have policies that differ between fan trading, versus archiving here.

Please note the comments on “The Grateful Dead Internet Archive Project” Recording range from the primordial Acid Test Recording from 1965 through the final Grateful Dead concert in 1995. There are multiple recordings of most concerts ranging from audience recordings through full digitally recorded soundboard ‘tapes’. Quality ranges from very poor to almost perfect. Note that concerts which have been released by the Grateful Dead organization or by Rhino records are no longer available on the Internet Archive.

In 2011 I started a demonstration project for CouchDB on the windows platform using Ruby on Rails and (later) Microsoft MVC. This lead to a series of blog posts on reverse engineering the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection and collecting an abstract of meta data into couchdb (note the recording themselves were NOT loaded into my local couchdb database). The Ruby On Rails series of posts can be found here. The MVC post can be found here. Reviewing the concerts has lead me to post a series of blogs on concert recording of the Grateful Dead I personally found interesting. This series, which can be found here, is on going.

The 1966 Tapes

This current blog lists hyperlinks into the Internet Archive for the 1966 recordings. Please note I am listing here ONE recording per performance. The achieve includes tapes contributed by multiple sources. I am using a simple hierarchical method to select which recording to list for each date:

The recording is a soundboard recording processed by Charlie Miller

The recording is a soundboard recording

The is the most recently submitted tape for a given date

The tape linked here is not necessarily the best recording for a given date but it is the best an algorithm can select. Just click the Listen hyperlink to jump to the Internet Archive and its player to hear the concert. If you are interested in other recording on the same date click on the “check for other copies” link within the Internet Archives page. I will be posting additional years as time passes. Have fun and keep dancing. Remember, Jerry died for our sins.